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Previously I was a senior editor of Forbes magazine, and before that I was for many years the managing editor of American Heritage and the editor of the quarterly Invention & Technology. I've emceed the annual induction ceremony at the National Inventors Hall of Fame, done the play-by-play over the P.A. system on a cruise ship as it passed through the Panama Canal, and written on the history of bourbon whiskey and the making of Steinway pianos, among many, many other things. I prepared for all that by majoring in music in college and writing a senior thesis on the music of Hector Berlioz.
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Has the NRA Critically Wounded Itself?

After the mass murder in an elementary school in Newtown Connecticut, on Friday, December 14, some formerly unyielding gun-rights supporters in Congress began to change their views, and it started to look as if the National Rifle Association’s total power to bock any gun control legislation might be beginning to crack, as I reported here. Then yesterday, after a week of total silence, the NRA emerged, with its executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, giving a press statement in which he dismissed the possibility of any new controls whatever on assault weapons or ammunition magazines or gun sales. Rather he devoted his remarks to blaming mass murders on everyone from gun control supporters to video game producers and calling for a “national school shield safety program” that would essentially turn every school building in America into an armed fortress, every schoolyard into a war zone.

This proposal has found some supporters, but it has also provoked broad revulsion that might lead more Americans to see the NRA as a radical organization, the supporter not so much of ordinary gun owners as of gun manufacturers and sellers. And this might make it more possible for congressmen and senators who have been unyielding in their fealty to the organization to show some independence from its demands.

The New YorkPost, an editorially very conservative paper that belongs to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation (albeit a paper in a very liberal city), ran the front page shown above today, with the headline “GUN NUT! NRA loon in bizarre rant over Newtown.” New York’s other tabloid daily, the Daily News, offered “CRAZIEST MAN ON EARTH: Just 90 MINUTES after moment of silence for Newtown victims, vile NRA nut blames everyone and everything EXCEPT the GUNS.”

Michael Steele, former chairman of the Republican National Committee, wasn’t shrill like the New York papers, but he was just as perplexed. When asked his response to LaPierre’s statement, he was at first silent, and then said, “I don’t know where to begin. . . . I just found it very haunting and very disturbing that we are country talking about arming our teachers and principals in classrooms. What does that say about us? . . . I do not believe that is the response that should be coming out of the tragedy in Newtown.” Michael Bloomberg, the sometimes Republican mayor of New York, called the NRA briefing “a shameful evasion of the crisis facing our country . . . a paranoid, dystopian vision.” Republican Gov. Chris Christie of New Jerseysaid, “I don’t think that the solution to safety in schools is putting [in] armed guard . . . you’d have to have an armed guard outside every classroom. [And] you don’t want to make this an armed camp for kids.” John Cornyn of Texas, one of the most powerful Republicans in the Senate, said, “I always think making decisions when you’re angry or scared leads to worse decisions.”

Many across America, including some in Congress and some in Newtown, have voiced support for the NRA’s plan to make every school in the country into a fortress protected by unarmed shooters, but there are clearly cracks in the facade of the association’s power as never before. I couldn’t help noticing that back on Tuesday, when I wrote “Is the Mighty NRA Beginning to Topple,” the comments it received where mostly pro-NRA. Yesterday, when I wrote “NRA Proposes to Turn Every School Into an Armed Fortress,” the comments were overwhelmingly, almost entirely, anti-NRA. Maybe the way millions of Americans feel is beginning to change. As one of my commenters yesterday wrote, “It seems NRA is trying to make lemonade . . . morally wrong, likely to backfire on them.”

So you have to wonder if we won’t soon be hearing more voices like this commenter’s: “Face it. The NRA doesn’t give a damn about our kids. They see this as another chance to sell more guns for the Industry they REALLY serve (Not responsible gun owners, but manufacturers).”

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The NRA seems to have forgotten that there were armed guards at Columbine and in Tuscon where Jared Lee Loughner shot Gabrielle Giffords and 17 others.

Security that works doesn’t depend on just one measure. It will take improved school security, sure. It will also take better control over high tech weapons like the AR-15 that is so commonly used in mass shootings, background checks on weapons owners, and steps requiring better weapon security to prevent those not authorized from using the weapons.

Yeah it’s funny how the gun control crowd can kill our kids with those free kill zone signs and then turn around and call gun owners crazy. That being said the armed security Idea isn’t horrible. Obamas own kids are guarded by heavily armed security guards at their school, what makes our kids less valuable. And if we could get some sort of movement to secure schools with buzz in only door systems and classroom doors that can lock down if an intruder does get it, We might not even need any posted armed people at all. Every county and every school could examine their unique needs and act accordingly. But what ever happens we need something better than some stupid call for less scary looking guns.

“…high tech weapons like the AR-15 that is so commonly used in mass shootings…”

You are either delusional or just plain stupid. An AR-15 is not high tech and in year 2010 a total of 358 people were killed with ALL TYPES of rifles while 745 people were killed by ‘hands, fists, or feet’.

Source: FBI as told in Washington Examiner story “‘If you want to end gun deaths, don’t start with rifles’.

I know about guns, I was wounded in Viet Nam, I have been, no longer am a gun owner. When one realizes that more people have died in the last 43 years from guns in America than all the deaths in all the wars the United States has ever fought then it is time to rethink our national gun policy. This commentary that the only way to solve gun violence is to arm more people sees to the be new definition of stupidity.

So what you’re saying is somehow different, and better, than the NRA proposal? To have, not all but many, half cocked underpaid, overworked sometimes tormented teachers carrying steel, ready to react to a pindrop, be it intruder or student? Capital punishment redefined? Yeah..uhmmm..I don’t think so, Mr. Wizard. How about banning guns across the board. Wanna hunt? Do it with a crossbow, or a snare and a club. Wanna target shoot? Use a wrist rocket. Wanna shoot your wife? Do it with a thumb and forefinger. Ban ‘em. Throw up metal detectors everywhere. Gotta gun? 6 months to turn it in. Wanna buy a gun? 20 years in a prison cell. Take away the sentiment and what do you have with guns? One big problem. 5 years from now gun crime will be a page in history books. Oh yeah, wanna challenge the government? Do it with a fat wallet, becaiuse that’s what really matters when it comes to change.

Sitting Ducks? You gun nuts are so delusional. We can see from what you write how crazy you are. We don’;t want your stupid guns anywhere around our children. More of your stupid guns is NOT the answer and if you guys continue with this type of crazy talk. You will end up with water guns in the end.

You get what you pay for as far as armed guards. How about psychological evaluations for candidates that run for office? I see some real loonies on both sides of the aisle. AR15, high tech? Seriously? The Eugene Stoner creation dates back to the 1950′s. That, my friend, is “high tech” to you? You have slept through the modern weapons created since then. Do you only come out on “Warthog Day”?